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Defense Secretary Ash Carter admitted to Michael Fallon, the UK’s secretary of defense, that it was clear fairly early on the program would not meet their standards.
In the same statement, Carter said he remained “convinced that a lasting defeat of ISIL in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated, and capable ground forces”. “We are now changing to a model that will produce more military combat capability”, a senior U.S. defence official said. “U.S.-trained Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State have the equipment and the training to call in airstrikes, but have yet to be authorized to do so, according to a US official with knowledge of the program”.
Instead, the U.S. will focus on training and arming vetted leaders of established Kurdish and Arab groups already on the ground inside Syria.
The Pentagon’s $500 million training plan has fallen far short of its initial goal of training 5,400 rebels a year.
When Congress initially funded the program, there was talk of creating a force of tens of thousands of fighters that would eventually take all of Syria.
The Pentagon will monitor the progress of the groups and provide them with air support in the fight against ISIL. But the program fell apart after US-trained rebels handed over their weapons and trucks to the al-Nusra Front, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, as soon as they crossed into Syria from Turkey.
“That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with additional groups in other parts of Syria going forward”.
President Barack Obama’s administration unveiled the training programme in January but recruitment was slow because rebels had to pass stringent background checks to weed out extremists.
The USA announces a change of strategy in its backing for Syrian rebel forces attempting to overthow the Assad regime in the light of Russia’s recent military intervention.
Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s number three civilian official, said however that the United States had “pretty high confidence” in the Syrian rebels it would supply, and that the equipment would not include “higher end” arms such as anti-tank rockets and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft rockets. Lindsey Graham said the program was bound for failure from the start.
It’s been nigh on impossible for the administration to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys in Syria, so they’ve taken a “hope these dudes are less awful” approach.
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“This problem, compounded by the administration’s immoral refusal to protect those we train from Putin’s bombs, could doom this new effort to the same failure as the previous one”, McCain said.
